The Renovation Diaries are a new collaboration with our community in which we feature your step by step renovation progress and provide monetary support towards getting it done in style.

As part of our new Renovation Diary program, we're taking you into kitchens and bathrooms all over the country to meet the homeowners and be a part of the process as these rooms are transformed week by week. In this post, we're introducing you to Seth and Allison, who are in the process of remodeling their kitchen, as well as making significant changes to the layout of their home that will make the kitchen and adjoining family room a lot more useful.

From Allison:

When we purchased this house, we knew that it would require a lot of work. The half-century-old layout is chopped up into many separate rooms, which contrasts with our style and also accounts for a lot of awkward and wasted space. The goal of the renovation is to make better use of space through an open floor plan.

The area most in need of this update is the kitchen and family room space. The two rooms are currently separated from one another by a wall, and the space also doesn't take enough advantage of the deck and backyard it's connected to. What began as a kitchen and family room renovation evolved into an entire house remodel once we took a good look at the house with our architect and assessed our long term goals for the space.

In order to reconfigure the existing floor plan, most of the walls in the house are going to be taken down to the studs, and there will be a lot of rearranging. Still, the most exciting part of the design and renovation process is the kitchen and family room space. Our plan there is to open the kitchen up onto what is currently an awkwardly shaped den. This will involve tearing out the existing kitchen and rearranging and reworking the layout, as well as rearranging and replacing windows and lighting.

As one of the most important elements of the renovation is incorporating the outdoor space, we will be replacing an existing sliding glass door off the family room with a two-panel, multi-slide door from Western Window Systems, which disappears into a pocket into the wall when open.

We've planned the renovation so that the bulk of the work will be completed before we move in, which gives us the freedom to completely strip it down and make a huge mess. This turns out to have been an especially good decision now that we've learned we're expecting our first child this summer: all that drywall dust probably wouldn't be the best thing for an expectant mom to breathe in every night. (Even if I did, unknowingly, breathe in plenty while doing the initial demo!)

Thanks, Allison!

Check out the full series (so far) and be sure to join us next week for #4 of Seth & Allison's Diary.